News publishers will need to reduce their reliance on Facebook to survive, experts have warned, as figures show a dramatic drop in interactions with their content on the platform during the course of last year.

Press Association (PA) analysis of data from social media analytics company Newswhip revealed a huge fall in engagements – a combination of reactions, comments and shares – on website content for many of the UK’s biggest news websites towards the end of 2017.

Among these were the top three performing sites in the UK: bbc.co.uk saw total engagements down 22 per cent compared with December 2016, with the dailymail.co.uk down 42 per cent and independent.co.uk down 47 per cent.

According to the figures, Facebook provided nearly 40 per cent of traffic from web publishers in January 2017, but this fell to 26 per cent by the end of November.